• 1 L’enfance est l’état de l’âme habitée par quelque chose à quoi nulle réponse n’est jamais faite, el (...)
• 2 Several critics underline that the notion of ‘infancy’ is a key concept running through Lyotard’s t (...)

2If There but for the seems less urgently plugged onto a burning present than Summer, it gained a renewed power of interpellation in what may go down in history as the spring of the lockdown: we were then hearing about old people dying by the dozen in nursing homes, without being able to see and to be seen one last time by their friends and relatives. In There but for the, May Young, the central character and focaliser of the third part of the book, finds herself within the four walls of a hospital—soon to be replaced by an old people’s home. It also happens that May has lost the power to make herself heard—or so it seems at first—and can only speak ‘within the confines of her head’ (203). Even before May gets smuggled out of the hospital at the end of the third part, Smith rescues the old lady from her prison by giving her a voice and showing us that she is very much ‘there’, to take up the first word of the title, despite the fact she may be considered by some as being ‘not all there’ any more. The old lady is not only alive and lively, but she is given a vital part to play in the book, being one of the four pillars of the narrative. This does not mean that we immediately or fully understand why she is there at all, being so remotely connected to Miles, the man at the centre of the book. In fact, we need to leave the gap open at first, which invites us to focus on the analogy that can be drawn between the old lady who has withdrawn ‘inside the confines of her head’ (205) and the man who has deliberately locked himself inside the guestroom of virtual strangers. May’s monologue eventually adds a piece to the puzzle that is Miles, but it first duplicates Miles’s enigmatic silence. As it happens, in both cases, silence has been at least partly chosen: it is not just something one needs to be rescued from, but something that itself may need to be rescued. May’s part foregrounds the motif of a debt that cannot, yet must, be paid, a debt that connects May and Miles in a tacit manner and involves the recognition of something that cannot be put into words—a notion which finds an echo in the absolute debt Jean-François Lyotard considers we owe to what he calls ‘infancy’.1 What is approached by Lyotard through the helplessness of the infant2 is more than just a stage in life and not something out of which one grows:

• 4 See the passage quoted above (note 1): ‘L’enfance est l’état de l’âme habitée par quelque chose à q (...)

3Infancy is ‘the state of the soul inhabited by something to which no answer is ever given’4 something which is not outside language but at its core. Having to live with the silent presence of Miles at the heart of a house, the Lees start feeling they are becoming strangers to themselves. May, as for her, is not entirely mute and reaches us through a silent voice which weaves the spoken and the unspoken together. In the tight network that emerges from one chapter to the next, May paradoxically comes close to another character, Brooke Bayoude, the child who cannot stop talking and cannot help playing with language. While it may come in the way of discourse, ‘the remainder of discourse’ (Lyotard) also propels the narrative, giving a greater resonance and a heightened power to words, displacing and reinvigorating meaning at every step. Subverting the topos of ‘second childhood’, May invites us to imagine infancy as being involved in a form of resistance to death rather than a sign of regression or decline. I thus propose to show how Smith rescues not just voice but silence through the character of May and how, far from simply opposing them, she binds them together through an in-fant tongue of sorts.

• 5 Warner here refers explicitly both to Florence Dupont (The Invention of Literature) and Margaret At (...)

6The voice we hear emerges from a text freely mixing narration with direct, indirect as well as free indirect speech, as if to underline its ability to come through whatever channel it needs to take. Beyond the wide use of free indirect discourse, the narrative bears the mark of that process of ‘magnetization’ or ‘contagion’ which Rendall Stevenson describes as characteristic of Joyce’s style: what we read ‘seem[s] as if written by the characters who appear in them: as if the characters were somehow helping to tell their own story, shaping its style around their distinctive linguistic habits and expressive idioms’ (Stevenson 50). The whole of the third part, although largely in the third person and not strictly a monologue, ‘seems as if written’ by May, the person inside the pink hospital gown. Marina Warner suggests that Smith’s books project an image of the writer ‘as stenographer, as secretary of her characters, as taking dictation from the beings in the book and passing them down a live wire’ (Germana and Horton vi). Interestingly, Warner finds in all the voices that Smith invents a ‘hauntedness’ which reminds us that ‘literature was always created to resist death and bring back the dead as if they were still there’ (Germana and Horton vi).5 Although in this particular instance May is ‘still there’ because ‘she is not dead yet’, the text which carries her voice exemplifies the power voice gains when it is torn away from silence. Her monologue extends the reach of prosopopoeia, the rhetorical device which consists in attributing a voice to someone or something normally deprived, or no longer possessed, of the power to speak. Of the four parts of the book May’s part is the most musical, the one which is carried with the greatest momentum (as if modelled on one of the Gracie Fields songs that run through the old lady’s head). Through May’s voice, Smith writes ‘a conjuration against lifelessness’ (Germana and Horton vii) to borrow Warner’s words again, but she also questions the way life and ‘lifelessness’ find themselves defined and distributed in the book.

• 6 As Diane Leblond puts it in her joint presentation of There but for the and Artful: ‘For all the ch (...)

7May’s speech offers yet another angle from which to approach the question of what it means to be ‘there’, a word on which not only the first part, called ‘there’, but the whole book can be considered to be a long meditation. The silent visitor sitting in May’s room (her future rescuer in fact) could be seen as a double of Anna who finds herself knocking on the Lees’ guestroom door and calling to Miles ‘Are you there?’ (5). ‘See if you can get her to talk . . . . We are all missing to hear her. I tell her all the time. We’re all missing her wit about the place’, (227): these are the words of the nurse talking to the visitor, a reminder, in passing, that May used to be the life and soul of the place. ‘Within the confines of her head’, May professes her liking for that nurse because ‘[she] had the measure of the spirit of things. She knew there was more to an old body than an old body’ (227). While being ‘there’ may seem to be the most straightforward and unquestionable thing in the world, what comes through as the word flashes on and off throughout the book is that it can never be taken for granted.6 In fact, while May’s thereness has to be sought beyond the strange body she now inhabits, it is also that body which has the power to remind those who would rather not see it that she is ‘not dead yet’. The little accident in the car which takes her away from the hospital at the end of the chapter is an arch reminder of that. May remembers a different era when one did not need ‘the intimate’ (her word for the internet) to enjoy the life of the body; she remembers relishing everything younger generations always think they are the first to discover: ‘Just very good at keeping it quiet, is what we were’ (234). The picture of the post-war period that unfolds as May revisits the past is not meant to simply convey a sense of nostalgia. May stubbornly resists dematerialization in this age where ‘[it is all] the intimate, and answerphones and things you had to speak at rather than to. Nobody there’ (214). Before she stopped using a phone, May remembers leaving that precise message, ‘nobody there’, on her daughter’s answerphone, a habit described as ‘distressing’ and ‘creepy’ (214) by the recipient. ‘We are here . . . We’re just choosing not to answer the phone’ (214) is the answer May finally gets.

• 7 Dolar devotes several pages in A Voice and Nothing More to what he calls ‘the acousmatics of the vo (...)

8What Eleanor, May’s daughter, finds disturbing is perhaps the fact that the voice that insists on finding someone at the other end of the line, is itself too much ‘there’, when those who claim they ‘are here’, are not ‘here’ at all in fact (my emphasis), or at least are not here (enough) for someone who needs to speak to someone. It is impossible not to connect that ‘creepy’, or should we say spooky, voice May leaves on the machine with the voice of Faye, the ghost of Mark’s mother, who talks even before her son does at the beginning of the ‘but’ part and who is said to have ‘been making a bed in his ear’ (93). At first sight the two ladies are poles apart: Faye has ‘been dead for forty-seven years’ whereas May, as she cares to repeat, ‘is not dead yet’. And yet the voice inside the answerphone or inside May’s body and the bodiless voice of Faye both convey in their own way the power that voice may gain when its source remains invisible. Writing about this ‘acousmatic’ voice7 Mladen Dolar shows how invisibility allows voice to be heard for itself (while ordinarily it disappears behind the words it carries). Dolar also underlines that, paradoxically, that voice which ‘implies’ the body or ‘holds bodies and languages together’ (60) does not quite ‘fit the body’ (60) and has a particular ability to ‘detach itself from the body and leave it behind’ (73): ‘It is a bodily missile that has detached itself from its source, emancipated itself, yet remains corporeal’ (73). The rupture or disruption involved means that while voice ‘has an inherent link to presence . . . to the point of endorsing the very notion of presence’, it ‘presents a break’ (60) which upsets presence and self-presence.

• 8 For further analysis of the complex interweaving of voice and silence, see Voices and Silence in th (...)

9All the voices that feature in the novel are by definition invisible. Yet Smith finds a way of detaching certain voices and making them louder or strange—a narrative and stylistic equivalent (with multiple variations) of the recorded voice, the voice left on the answerphone. The paradox that Dolar describes helps account for the fact that Faye and May can be said to be much more ‘there’ than the guests sitting around the Lees’ dinner table whose conversation threatens to turn into confused chatter and eventually into noise. May and Faye’s voices matter because of the body they ‘imply’, a challenge to hollow words and meaningless small talk. The fact that the body in question should be so close to death can be felt to reinforce both the sense of separation and ‘alienation’ from that body and its inevitable and insistent presence. Rescuing May’s voice means far more than saving someone who is ‘not dead yet’, it means rescuing someone and something from an erasure which is worse than death. Some form of silence is required to be able to hear the words coming from inside the body. But while it helps pry our ears open, silence also demands to be heard for itself.8

• 9 In a book where the ‘tyrannical logic of surveillance’ is a pervading theme, as Andrei-Bogdan Popa (...)

12Miles’s urgent need to send out someone for May (the ‘for’ marking purpose and intention) is perhaps all the more vital as there remains something which cannot not be accounted for (the ‘for’ marking cause or origin). May’s monologue brings back the past and its stories but also the past and its silences. There is no need to look for any guilt to justify Miles’s behaviour, it is hinted that Jennifer died of an undiagnosed heart condition. In the first interlude, we read about this girl, Jennifer, who ‘had gone to bed one night and the next morning nobody had been able to wake her up. It was a total mystery. There weren’t many mysteries left’ (76).9 Through his yearly visits to May, Miles might be paying a sort of absolute debt, that ‘debt to infancy’ which involves something that cannot be spoken. What is owed to May is owed to Jennifer and to the ‘mystery’ of Jennifer’s death: it must be paid every year through a visit, however fleeting, although/because it can never be fully paid. May explicitly points out that some things can never be ‘settled’, a fact incongruously brought home to her by the sudden memory of an innocent rabbit she once killed:

• 10 ‘In the differend, something “demands” to be phrased and is exposed to the wrong of failing to be p (...)

14This elaborate scene opposes not just words and silence but two kinds of silence. The silence that resonates between the words is in fact silenced by the whirring noise of the machine: ‘the loud absence’ that finds its way in-between the words and the noise must be shut out. The outcome of the conversation is that Jennifer is forbidden to see and speak to her friend, which results in the girl’s stark refusal to talk to her parents: ‘Jennifer stops speaking. Jennifer won’t speak . . . she sits insolent and silent’ (252). To her parents’ brutal attempt to silence her, Jennifer opposes her own ‘loud’ silence, a silence not meant to blot things out but that demands to be heard. In it, we can hear an instance of the wrong Jean-François Lyotard describes in The Differend when ‘something demands to be phrased’ and fails to be: ‘Dans le différend, quelque chose “demande” à être mis en phrases et souffre du tort de ne pouvoir l’être à l’instant’ (Lyotard 1983, 30).10 The silence that connects May and Miles across the threshold thickens once the reader becomes aware of the wrong done to a child and the answer which was never given to another child.

• 11 See quotation in note 1.

15The second half of May’s monologue reveals that May can talk, but she simply will not, in the same way as she will not swallow the pills that are given to her, in her opinion ‘to make her forget the day, the month, the prime minister’ (208). May is probably doing herself harm: the pills she keeps under her tongue could be the cure for what is cryptically marked on her file as UTI MRSA, i.e. a drug resistant infection. But resist she must, in one way or another, when looms the prospect of ‘Harbour House’, the old people’s home that May dreads more than death: ‘[she] would rather die and go to hell than wake up one day and find [her]self an inmate in that guest house of gone minds, gone things, bad carpets, furniture that needs permission’ (211). May’s silence partly echoes Miles’s resistance, if it may be called that, considering that Miles is the kind of man who ‘prefer[s] not to’ (114) and who, like the enigmatic Bartleby, resists without opposing any resistance, absconds while remaining impossible to dislodge. Whatever significance we attribute to Miles’s choice to take up residence inside the Lees’ guestroom (he does not seem to be quite sure himself), the result is that it puts them under the obligation to give their undesirable guest food and shelter. The Lees owe Miles nothing but they find themselves faced with an absolute debt. In the general economy of the text everyone ends up finding themselves tied and indebted to someone else, a ‘hostage’ (Lyotard) to an ‘unknown host’,11 Smith ironically turning the hosts themselves into hostages. As the recipient of Miles’s message, May’s presence in the text makes it clear that the mystery man is no exception and that more clearly than anyone else he is paying an absolute debt, ‘a debt to life’ (Lyotard) and to the unspoken that comes with it. Being somehow at the end of the chain and the closest to death, May could have been locked in the most complete silence and yet her part in the overall composition is imagined rather differently.

• 12 For further considerations on the figure of the parasite and on Smith’s approach to ‘being-with’, s (...)

16Miles introduces a radical interruption in the narrative: Greenwich, the leafy suburb of the Lees, also happens to be on the Prime Meridian. Somehow Miles withdraws into that zero zone when he removes himself from the dinner table. In the middle of a conversation that goes nowhere and where not a word can be got in edgeways, the only thing to do is perhaps to vanish altogether rather that feed the ambient noise. In a paper which opts for a Heideggerian reading of Miles’s withdrawal, Ben Davies suggests that the Lees’ spare room ‘opens up a space for thought’, ‘a space for thinking about dwelling’ and that ‘both characters and readers are invited “to take the measure” of Miles’s dwelling, as well as their own’ (Davies 510). The figure of Bartleby, alluded to in passing, may complement that interpretation of Miles’s forced occupation of the room but it also colours it slightly differently, lending it darker and more tragic undertones. The way the figure of the uninvited guest and the parasite are compounded through Miles certainly emphasizes a mode of presence which is not entirely straightforward.12 Besides, although the suspended time Miles inhabits is to some extent the time of the fable or the allegory, Miles also moves inside real time, so that the Lees’ guestroom could become like ‘the Centre for Temporary Permanence (or interchangeably, the Centre for Permanent Temporariness)’ (6) Anna used to work for. Miles’s own thereness, is something one could freeze into, a state of being neither living nor dead, a still zone out of which no exit is to be found—‘but for’ the presence of someone out there who is ‘not dead yet’. The characters that revolve around Miles can be considered to free his silence from the absolute zero that needs to be inscribed somewhere, a zero the does not mark just an end, but a beginning. Davies’s reference to Heidegger proves particularly fitting in this case: ‘Miles creates a boundary that at once stops people from entering but also marks “that from which something begins its presencing” (‘Building Dwelling Thinking’)’ (Davies 511). Anna, who has been knocking on the Lees’ door to no avail (‘Miles, are you there?’), is left pondering over Miles’s silence:

• 13 May could be perceived as suffering from dementia, but Smith chooses to challenge that notion and c (...)

18‘May Young was old. You’ll always be ‘young’ now you’ve married me, Philip had whispered in her ear at the altar, June 7, 1947. But she was no fool, she knew exactly how old she was’ (201). These words placed on the first page of May’s section set the tone for what follows: if May has reached the stage some call second childhood, it is not to be understood as a euphemism for senility.13 May will not be treated as a child or infantilized. On the other hand, she displays a youthful disposition which manifests itself in her gusto and energy and through an orality that takes different forms. May loves a sweet and when offered one by Josie, the girl sent out to visit her, she ‘open[s] her mouth like a child’ (243); later, having prompted Josie to organise her escape, she agrees to wait till after lunch so as not to miss out on the mince, her favourite dish. Orality, however, mostly expresses itself in the pleasure taken in language. Apart from the fact that May easily skips or somersaults from one idea to the next, her monologue is full of puns, a feature which, to some extent, all the main characters of the book share, chief among them Brooke Bayoude, the truant child.

• 14 ‘Infans’, foreword to Lectures d’enfances.

19May and Brooke embody in their own manner the principle of free association that runs through the text and plays havoc with meaning. One distinctive effect of this disruptive principle appears in the way it breaks down words and redistributes phonemes. In his review of the book for the New York Times, Charles Mc Grath described Smith’s heavy use of puns as ‘almost tic-like’—‘as if Ms Smith couldn’t quite help herself’. The fact that punning may end up appearing mechanical at times is an indication of how fundamental it is to the make-up of the novel. At every step, the text displays its ability to double upon itself, to make and unmake itself. The repetition or dislocation of words could be seen as an instance of the ‘stammering’ or ‘stuttering’ (or more ambiguously in French ‘radotage’) which Lyotard considers as an apt way to bring out ‘what does not allow itself to be written, in the written text’14—even if in Smith’s text new meanings never fail to emerge from the meaningless letters. One may also think of Deleuze’s singular approach to stuttering in ‘Bégaya-t-il’, ‘bégaiement’ being reinvented as a language of affect where the sentence is forever felt to be in the making, or ‘becoming’, and grammar in a constant state of ‘imbalance’ (‘une syntaxe du devenir’, ‘une grammaire du déséquilibre’ 141). For Deleuze too, the tension created by what he calls stuttering ‘brings language to its limit, its outside, its silence’ (‘faire bégayer la langue, et en même temps porter le langage à sa limite, à son dehors, à son silence’ [142]). Smith’s particular handling of words can be seen as a making it ‘noisier’, to take up Anna’s suggestion: every word of the title in particular (‘there’, ‘but’, ‘for’, ‘the’) is regularly detached, italicized or emphasized in one way or another. The unobtrusive words, words we often simply do not notice, suddenly ‘demand’ to be heard. The making it noisier is also a making it strange. Punning underlines the instability of meaning, but also a core of nonsense that is part and parcel of language. Brooke has pointedly been seen as an Alice kind of character. May herself flirts with nonsense when she opens her mouth and notices that ‘The wrong things were coming out of her mouth by themselves’ (242).

• 15 Talking about what he calls the effect of the ‘even if’, le ‘quand même’, Lyotard writes: ‘L’effet (...)

20Allowing everything, anything, including ‘the wrong things’ to come out is perhaps not to be considered as a mere game in a book which offers various instances of a ‘wrong’ to which you can never really do justice, to refer to Lyotard again. The wrong that cannot be spoken not only demands to be heard but demands an answer—literally demands that we find some kind of idiom for it. This idiom does not cancel the différend, as Gérald Sfez puts it, but ‘signs and countersigns it’: ‘La phrase trouvée persiste et signe le différend. En un sens elle le contresigne’. Interestingly in Lectures d’enfance, Lyotard approaches infancy through the ‘as if’ children ‘know so much about’ (66), a ‘comme si’ which he also connects with ‘survivance’, survival, or rather the possibility to ‘invert the meaning of survival’. Lyotard points out that, in this instance, survival must not be confused with remission or a form of defiance in the face of annihilation; he sees it as a ‘scrupule’, a concern and care for this ‘as if’ (‘Je dirais sans plus d’explication que cette pensée de la vie comme énigme du commencement n’est acceptable que s’il ne s’agit pas de rémission, ni d’un défi, mais d’un scrupule. Le scrupule d’un comme si’ [65]). This image of the ‘survivant’ seems particularly apt to describe what is conveyed in There but for the through the figure of May: ‘her not dead yet’ is no denial of death and no mere ‘remission’ either; it is more like this ability to begin again and again which has found its idiom, an idiom for which the ‘silent voice’ which Smith invents could be a name. The ‘debt’ to infancy is a debt to the utter powerlessness in which the in-fant can find itself but also to what it ‘knows about (day)dream, memory, questions, invention, obstinacy, heartfelt listening, love, and a true receptiveness to stories’,15 all of which have their own way of suspending the meaning of what is spoken and of accommodating the unspoken.